(guest blogged by Howie Klein)

A friend turned me on to an indie band from Florida a few years ago--friends of his--he said he was 100% positive I would love. He was right. They're Against Me! They're not exactly a new band, more like an underground band that is just starting to surface. Tom Gabel, the singer and guitar player started playing as Against Me! a decade and a half ago. He was just an impassioned singer-songwriter back then. Now he's an impassioned singer-songwriter with a kick ass punk band behind him. Do you ever hear older folks who were against the War in Vietnam complaining that there are no young musicians making socially relevant music anymore? They're wrong; they're just not going to the right places to listen.

You won't find Against Me on too many corporately owned radio stations or see them on former music TV channels like MTV. A better place to hear and see their music is at MySpace or YouTube. Tonight the band's first video, "White People For Peace," from their Sire Records debut NEW WAVE (which comes out next month) is our LNMC song.

Continue reading »

Road Runner! The Best of the Gants
	Artist: The Gants

Last night was about happy, tonight we're gonna do sad. Here's my favorite band from Greenwood, MS doing a song first made popular by Johnny Burnette. What's the saddest song you can think of?

Cool for Cats
	Artist: Squeeze

Tonight's song is an oft told story of boy meets girl, love and baby ensues, drinking ensues, girl leaves, girl meets other boy, original boy is all alone. It was a hit for the Squeeze in 1979, and is one of their most popular songs. What's your favorite story song?

This song has been getting quite a bit of spins in our household, as any song about animals is popular with the kiddos. I never tire of listening to the amazing vocal interplay between Buck Owens and Don Rich, one of the greatest vocal duos in history. What's your favorite song about animals?

Innocence & Despair
	Artist: Langley Schools Music Project

Between 1976 and 1977, Canadian school teacher Hans Fenger set up recording equipment in the Langley School gym and proceeded to record students performing popular rock songs. The results are both joyous and haunting. This version of Desperado is about as close as I will get to the Eagles.

Heaven Just Got Funkier

Earl Palmer, perhaps the most recorded drummer in the history of popular American music, died last Friday at the age of 84. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, the New Orleans native set the beat for an amazing variety of artists, including, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Frank Sinatra, Lou Rawls, Bonnie Raitt, and Sarah Vaughan. In the 70's, I had the privilege of working with Earl for a few years in Maria Muldaur's band. He was a brilliantly inventive, caring, man. In recent years, in addition to continuing to play, he served as an executive officer of the LA Musician's Union, working to ensure that older musicians received credit and royalties they were due. We lost an immortal, one of the founding fathers of Rock & Roll.

Filmsite.org:

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) is one of Hollywood's greatest, grandest and slickest musicals. The nostalgic, shamelessly-patriotic, entertaining film also supported the war effort as it paid tribute in its mostly fictional story to [George M. Cohan,] a popular Irish/American entertainer and the grand American gentleman of the theatre in the early 20th century.

The timeliness of its release, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, helped the 'propaganda machine' of going to European battlegrounds overseas with a song that was a rousing theme song written years earlier for WW I - Over There. And a second song, You're a Grand Old Flag, contributed to morale-boosting, flag-waving patriotism and love of one's country. And it was the first time that a living US President (FDR in this case, played by Jack Young) was portrayed in a motion picture.

"A Message To You, Rudy" is the first track on the eponymous debut album from English's hottest punk-ska band, The Specials. It was produced by Elvis Costello in 1979. It wasn't a single in the U.S. but it always had a potent message, never more so than in recent days. "Gangsters" was a bigger hit for them in the U.K. and this clip will give you a good idea of the infectious energy that made this ska band so popular among punk rockers in the late 70s.

I never could figure out why Dillinger, who has released at least 2 dozen albums, never got more popular in the U.S. In the late 70s, I was on tour with The Clash in the U.K. and Joe Strummer turned me on to Dillinger's music. Whenever I played him on my radio show, people always liked him, especially "Cokane In My Brain" (although people liked "Marijuana In My Brain" too); anything about brains... people just love. And remember, "Most people become boring, self obsessed imbeciles whilst taking cocaine."